Monthly Archives: June 2015

I don’t usually pay too much attention to lunar cycles, but this caught my eye because, 1) I am a Capricorn, and 2) tomorrow is July 1st and I am devoting the entire month to finishing my book.

Initially, I scheduled vacations and weekends off from writing, but I realized that I don’t have the time to take off. It’s going to be a push to get it all written in a month. I want all the writing done by July 31st, which, crazily enough, will feature yet another full moon. The second full moon in a month is called a Blue Moon. How auspicious is that, right?

Check out the following elephant journal article about what this full moon means:

Today I was working on the structure of the book and I have always known certain things.

First: It is going to be a short book. Really short. It is tentatively called Living a Project Driven Life and I am modeling it on Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist. There won’t be the graphical features of Kleon’s book because I’m not graphical like that, but it will be a small book, with the content chunked out in sections rather than chapters.

If you are a writer, you will sympathize with how difficult it is to write “short,” meaning, with economy and precision.

“I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” ~Blais Pascal

That’s mainly why I resist my work so much.

I have also made the decision to to write my book here , in this blog, in a series of posts over the next 31 days. I have already written some posts that I have scattered here and there throughout this blog that are sections of this book, but starting tomorrow, I am going to see if I can chunk out 300 word sections and post them here. Since I already have the daily posting momentum going, it will be easy just to post what I have worked on all morning and not have to think of alternate content every day.

What this means for you as readers of this blog, is that you can avail yourself of my system if you want, and see if it meets any of your needs, or adds value to your life.

Either way your feedback will be invaluable.

Doing it this way will be so good for me because it will give me someone to talk to, an audience who I already know and trust. I feel comfortable talking to you. You are like friends. Talking to you will help me with my tone.

So tomorrow it begins. I hope the Full Moon in Capricorn brings you a month of prosperity and fireworks, too.

This is my 126th post in a row. It’s getting hard now. My goal with this blog, ultimately, is to write content that adds value to the reader somehow.

I don’t even know what that means. When it comes to a blog like this, which is not really a yoga blog, or a food blog, it’s kind of a “lifestyle” blog. It’s the lifestyle of a yoga teacher, meditator, and writer, living with her partner and Corgi in small-town rural America. (The scenes on TV of where they were looking for the recent escaped inmates at Dannemora look a lot like around here.)

I am writing to figure out what my natural themes are. My hope is that I will write myself toward enlightenment. I want to drop crumbs and then go back and retrace where I’ve been.

Eventually, I would like to post only once a week. This posting every day is a game to see if to see if I can cut my chops, to practice persistence and stamina. It’s also to see what I write when I have nothing to say.

This morning the woman who stayed in our house and took care of Boomer while we were in Portland stopped by to return a book she borrowed. While she was here, I foisted another one on her. Not this Seth Godin, but a newer book by him. If she likes it, I’m going to foist Linchpin on her. Here is a reblog from 5 years ago. I hope you enjoy.

I really don’t want to be a foister, but I am. I am reading Seth Godin’s Linchpin at the moment and all I want to do is buy 20 copies and give them to people, press it into their hands with that annoying, desperate pleading in my eyes and say, “Pleeeeze! You simply MUST read this!!”

And I’m not even finished it yet; I’m only on page 120. This is such an important book (I believe), it’s about becoming indispensable. Like all his books, it’s brilliant, super easy to read, and so very RIGHT!

Here are a few of my underlinings:

“The job is not your work; what you do with your heart and soul is the work.” (p.97)

“When you have a boss, your job is to please the boss, not to change her. It’s okay to have someone you work for, someone who watches over…

G is so sick she sat on the couch and binge-watched DVR-ed episodes of Long Island Medium and drank copious amounts of hot water laced with coconut oil and raw honey. She is really sick.

I did 47 loads of laundry, went to the ATM, and to the store for ingredients to make homemade chicken soup (Jewish penicillin) tomorrow. Between Jennifer’s good advice (thanks Jen!) and my soup, we’ll wean her away from women with scary fingernails who speak to the dead.

While we were in Portland I did no writing except here. That was the plan. I gave myself permission not to write on vacation, but what it means is that tomorrow I need to sit in the Space Chair and start to crank.

Cranking isn’t writing. Cranking is like hand-pumping water. Nothing comes out for the first 500 pumps, but then, lo and behold, a little trickle, then a gush, and another, till eventually you’ve got a nice gush of paragraphs flowing.

I had that gushy rhythm going before I left, but I lost the momentum.

So now it’s crank-time again. This is why writers need to write every day, to keep the gush going.

A new student came to yoga tonight. Just moved here from Tucson. Desert to jungle.

She was really nice, but seemed to be a bit untethered.

The way I feel today. Neither here nor there. Piles of laundry litter the top of the stairway, waiting to be sorted and dragged to the basement for the laundry fairies.

There are 2 editions of the Aggravator to be gone through as quickly as possible, and mail to catch up on, and a ventilation issue at the studio to fix.

All want is to sit and stare and give my ears a chance to stop ringing.

G came home sick. Sore throat, head, ears and sinuses cemented shut. She didn’t go to work (but mowed the front lawn) and tried to tough it out without resorting to OTC symptom relief, but finally caved.

I taught Happy Hour Yoga. It always feels new and shiny even if I’ve been away this long.

Blogging on the IPad is ok, but it was really frustrating because I don’t know how to link to things without it taking forever, and my pictures took a long time to show up in my stream.

So tonight, in honor of transition night, I will add some random pictures that I wanted to post but couldn’t get to load.

This is G backpacking Obie through the Japanese Gardens.

This is Obie making friends with the evil arbor roses.

Yeah, that’s you, buddy.

And yeah, that’s me on the flight home.

If the weather is supposed to do what they predict, we’ll all be sitting here working cerebrally.

Departure day is always a little sad for me but even more so today because it was the last time at that house. In August they move to Beaverton and a bigger place with a green space in their backyard and a network of bike trails that extend for miles.

It’s a good move for them, but there are lots of memories in that place.

We had a beautiful and delicious breakfast this morning at a place called La Provence. Baked eggs, Brulleed Oatmeal, croissants, omelettes to die for.

Afterwards, back to the house for a little more Obie time.

I am having trouble with my internet connection tonight so my pictures aren’t coming through, but if they would come through there would be a cute pic of Obie sitting on my lap, right here, and then after that a pic of me asleep with my noise cancellers and neck pillow.

We had a shrieking baby behind us and loud little kids in front of us from Portland to Chicago. Our flight to Elmira has been delayed. I guess there are worse places to be delayed than ORD.

Like Philly.

Tomorrow, back to normal: the book, the studio, and a MUCH cleaner diet. The food was good. It was just a little TOO good.

Japanese Gardens and Ice Cream were the featured activities of the day.

I want the Japanese Garden all to myself for just an hour every day.

I really don’t think that’s too much to ask.

I want to sit meditation in either the raked gravel garden or on the hidden bench in the moss with the view of a small stream, or in the Tea House.

People in the Japanese Gardens are very reverential. They get it about this place. Japanese Garden people act very differently from Rose Garden people. Rose Garden people are lovely, too, but they are more distracted and chatty and take lots of pictures. Japanese Garden people are focused. And slow. And silent. They take pictures too, but in a different way.

They move slowly and quietly. They stand and watch. They are not tourists. Yet they are.

We are both Rose Garden and Japanese Garden people at different times. The baby was a Japanese Garden person in the Japanese Garden and a Rose person in the Rose Garden. After the Japanese Garden we went back to the Rose Garden for lunch where he reached a detente with those evil, spitting Arbor roses,too. Which is good. No sense carrying that grudge around your whole life.

After lunch we went to Salt and Straw which serves quirky ice cream flavors like Tahini and Cardamom, Honey Lavendar, and Cinnamon Snickerdoodle. G got a flight to taste a bit of 5 different ones. I got a float made with Stumptown Coldbrew and Double Fold Vanilla. My god. That’s all I have to say.

Then it was back home for some cocktails and a Uke lesson from Scott and a strumming lesson from Obie.

We ended the evening with a walk around their neighborhood. This is the view of Mt Hood taken a few streets over.

(All the photos the past few days were taken by G, who did me a total solid by taking and sending me pics throughout the day so I would have someting to post here other than words, which refuse to cooperate after long days of Portland happiness..and Gimlets.)Tomorrow we go into Airport world and fly back.